12.07.08

Our revels now are ended…

Posted in Life, London, Theatre at 10.01 am by Caitlin

Smooth sailing for The Tempest.

We had our production of The Tempest last Tuesday and we are now adjusting to life beyond the play. Hopefully we’ll have a cast reunion for pre-Christmas drinks very soon! There’s also talk of reviving the play in January, which I would absolutely love to do because I feel that we’ve only just begun to realise the potential of this production.

The lovely Zarina Holmes filmed the performance for us so I can’t wait to see the video. In the mean time, she has put some still photographs on Facebook. The photos are from a semi-dress rehearsal so a few of us, including myself, are not in full costume and no one has full make-up. It should give you a flavour though!

We were aiming to do The Tempest in the style of Artaud, which means we were trying to create an experience for the audience rather than emphasising the separation between player and audience. This was most evident in the first scene, the shipwreck, but we brought elements of it throughout the play. The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most ‘magical’ plays so it lends itself well to this sort of thing.

It was very different performing with 35 people standing and sitting around me. (We had two performances with 35 people in each showing). It was theatre-in-the-round and though we encouraged people to move around so they could see, in reality they stayed pretty still so we had to angle ourselves accordingly.

It all went a lot better than I thought it might after the shambles of the dress rehearsal. The audience seemed really engaged and entertained, which was great. We hit some real high notes with the performance and no real low notes – everyone pretty much remembered their lines.

I was playing Miranda, the heroine. My only hairy moment was, in the second performance, after the scene where I confronted Caliban the monster, the strap of my dress popped open. Fortunately I was wearing a safety pin with a rose, so I mimed crying into Prospero’s shoulder (my fictional father) while I refixed it. I wonder if anyone noticed. My fellow thespian didn’t – he just thought it was an inspired heightening of the dramatic effect!

I’m proud to have worked with such a talented group of people and I hope we can do this again soon. It was the City Academy advanced class – but we’re calling ourselves the Kinky Fish Company, in honour of the blindfolds and anchovy paste used in the play. As we said on the night of the performance, we’re all really grateful for our wonderful teacher Cat Clancy and all the hard work she put in – she went way beyond the call of duty and gave up a lot of her own time unpaid to help us.

Afterwards, my wonderful real-life beloved and betrothed gave me a huge bunch of dark red roses. Aww.

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Here’s the text from the programme so you can see who the actors are, refresh yourself on the plot of The Tempest, and read more about Artaud and his theories on theatre.

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